


Inferior Need

by SisterOfSeven



Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: Breastfeeding, F/F, Femslash, Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-04
Updated: 2017-10-04
Packaged: 2019-01-23 00:50:32
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,756
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12494696
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SisterOfSeven/pseuds/SisterOfSeven
Summary: Mere days after Seven of Nine was reclaimed by humanity, she fights the starvation of her lost connection with the Collective. Janeway is willing to do anything to help her, even tapping into maternal instincts she never knew she had.





	Inferior Need

She shivered straight-backed against the doctor’s bed, eyes wide as they panic-rolled taking in the room before the strain submitted to exhaustion. The Borg’s breaths were deep and sluggish, occasionally catching as though on some snag in the bodily mechanism. Her lingering bond to the Collective would not let her sleep, and yet Janeway could see her body was desperate for it. Sinewy muscle stretched taut for every automatic movement, each response to exhaustion and hunger, straying the line to malnutrition. 

                “I don’t know what to do,” Janeway said, sat by the bed with her head in her hands. “I was the one who pulled the plug, but I’m powerless to help her survive on her own.”

                Doctor looked over his patient, wrinkling her brow in the space before sleep as though fighting off an implausible nightmare. 

                “It appears her brain and internal organs are in a state of hormonal flux, regressing and developing simultaneously,” he said. “Almost as if she could go back to an infantile state on every level, save for retaining her bodily adulthood and mature perception of the world around her.”

                A pained expression flashed across Janeway’s face, followed by a fierce determination. “Is there any way I could help?”

                “There is something,” the Doctor said under his breath. “It would be somewhat experimental, I couldn’t guarantee it would work, but—”

                “Anything.” Janeway stood over the sick drone to look into the hologram’s eyes. “I don’t care what it is, as long as I can do something.”

                “If I were you, I’d prepare to eat my words,” the Doctor sighed and glanced down at his patient. “Apologies to present company for the unfortunate metaphor.”

 

As she changed into a medical gown behind a drawn white curtain – this could get quite messy, the Doctor had reiterated – she watched the silhouette of the Borg turn her head from side to side, just like the human impulse to shake off an unwanted tiredness. Seven of Nine. Nameless coming into her new life, the bond the two of them were about to form seemed fitting, if a little peculiar. She and Matthew had talked about having children in the theoretical way that warmed her heart to the idea, if not the reality of the sacrifice. She would be bound to Earth, no consideration of leaving them behind like she had her fiancé and sweet pup. She’d cried herself to sleep enough for them alone.

                If she had been told before coming out here that she’d wind up liberating a cybernetic organism from a sinister body, a sworn Federation enemy, who would need her to survive just like a child. Whoever sent the message, she would have laughed in their face. And yet here she was, about to nurse the phantom of the commitment she couldn’t have made, the impostor of the notional baby, treasured as the notion.

                It seemed a chill on the sickbay crept up under the gown as she drew back the curtain and saw the Doctor ready with her injection, Seven laid in chrome and leather, still. She took a seat on the bed beside the Borg, and her heart ached at the eyes shuddering side to side beneath the lids.

                “If you’ll lie back, Captain,” the Doctor urged her gently. “The process may take some time, and your body might initially reject the hormonal changes.”

                She laid herself down on the bed set up next to the alienised human being, never taking her eyes from Seven’s blank, yet sickened features as the Doctor touched the hypodermic to her arm. She barely felt the shock. All she wanted was to reach out to the Borg, to comfort her. The confusion of that impulse made her stomach churn.

 

She spent the night there, awake and waiting for something in her to feel different. There were only aches, nausea and her eyes adjusting to the sight of the being cut adrift from both her own kinds, resembling neither. It was impossible to tell whether the Borg slept or not, if she dreamed as she scanned her unseeing eyes across their lids. In the dark of the med bay, motes of light appeared to fire in the dark green veins that vine-climbed across her temples and hairless crown, to vanish beneath cybernetic implants almost indiscernible from the shadows surrounding them. 

                Janeway wanted to get up and move closer, for reassurance. That she wasn’t hallucinating a human response, however surreal and inside-out. For confirmation, one way or another, of what she was perceiving to happen. A touch might just have given her the warmth or pulse to know that her captive rescue was adapting, if at a painfully slow rate.

                But, no. Even lifting her head from the thin pillow made her guts lurch and burn with the threat of rising bile on an empty stomach. She hadn’t been able to bring herself to eat at all, during or after their encounter with Species 8472. Otherwise, the Doctor might have asked her to wait another day before attempting this experimental treatment. She’d take some sickness over that. 

                The burn and ache crawled up to settle in her breasts, and deep down in her pelvis like period pain. Good. A sign that the injection was doing its work, on its own time. 

                She brought a hand up under the gown to soothe the abdominal pain. Her hand felt warmer than usual. It was as though the heat at her centre was radiating into her extremities, pricks of a light sweat cold at her hairline. The sense of its movement intensified and shifted as Seven of Nine gave a breath that was almost a moan. 

                Janeway shivered and pulled the blankets still folded at the bottom of the bed up to her chin. At some point, she fell asleep and dreamed of being caught, bound at the waist and ankles by tendrils that could have been vines, or wires. 

 

Woken up by warm wetness, at first Janeway couldn’t place the sensation, disorientated by the struggle of her dream reaching through to her stiff, tired limbs. Face down in the pillow she could feel the stiff cushion of the bed right through, she gasped and bolted up with both hands on her chest. She was damp there, and the fluid had soaked all the way down the front of her gown and through the sheet on the bed, thin as the pillow. Friends and family around her having started families of their own, beguiling her with every detail of every kind of wayward liquid involved, she’d been prepared for this. _But_ , she thought, _perhaps not quite this much._

                “Good morning, Captain.” The Doctor chose that moment to start up his program, materialising behind her. “I see our experiment has proved a success thus far.”

                “It would seem so,” she replied, flustered and hitching the blankets back up to cover her modesty. “Although I would have preferred to tell you that in my own time.”

                “I shut down especially for you to get a good night’s rest,” the Doctor said, drawing up to his full height and regarding Janeway down his long nose. “I gave up my most productive hours, the least you could do is permit me to start the morning on schedule.”

                “Wait, what is the time?”

                “Oh-eight-hundred hours on the dot. Surely you know my schedule by now?”

                “I do know I should be on the bridge by now.” Janeway almost tripped over her blanket as she trailed it to the changing area to retrieve her uniform, giving the Doctor a glare before she tugged the curtains closed. 

 

As she dashed over to the bridge, it dawned on Janeway that she hadn’t spared even a glance at Seven of Nine before leaving sickbay. The Doctor had been stood between the two beds, his lack of comment on the Borg’s condition as good as confirmation of no change. He was probably stood over her taking down his tedious notes right now.

                She stopped in the empty corridor and almost turned back, the feeling that she’d abandoned her responsibility clutching cold around her heart. But if there had been no change, no sign of responsiveness returning, there would be no point to trying to feed her anyway.

                The captain’s hand went to press at her breastbone, but it was only a phantom feeling of the milk flowing unbidden again. Now it wasn’t there, she wished it were. There was always the possibility that one leak had been a fluke. 

                When she strode onto the bridge trying her hardest to look like she was still business as usual, every officer turned to watch as she took her post. She fought the urge to thrust her hands into her armpits, against the eventuality that the fluke decided to prove itself otherwise as she slunk her way to the captain’s chair. 

                “Morning, crew,” she said, arm across the back of the chair, casual. Casual, with a kind of maternal assurance that out-of-turn comments would provoke the dagger eyes of disappointment. “What’s new today?”

                “Little to report,” Tuvok said, raising a knowing eyebrow towards his commanding officer.

                “Besides the supernova we passed three-hundred light years to starboard, it’s been a quiet morning.” Chakotay regained his on-bridge professionalism as soon as the doors had closed behind the captain.

                “Roger that, a fat lot of nothing,” Tom Paris interjected as he stood up to meet Janeway face to face. “But may I offer up my helmsman’s observation and say you’re looking like a plate of Neelix’s pasta carbonara.”

                Janeway chuckled. There went her matronly presence. “Suffice it to say I didn’t get much sleep last night. Until I overslept.”

                “How’s our Borg stowaway doing?”

                The old eye daggers came out then. “Not well, Tom. I’d advise you to withhold any further observations.”

                After that, the assembled bridge crew held their curiosity till clock-off.

 

Something had got her crew’s blood up. That much was palpable in the silences broken only by the hushed beeps of computer and keyboards. The recent battles, teaming up with the Borg only to get shafted last-moment, all of it had left its afterburn over _Voyager_. But Janeway couldn’t shake the sense that there was something else beneath that. Something to do with the specific drone they’d saved, with no small suggestion of reluctance, and her own very obvious interest in the unwanted guest. 

                Or, of course, she could be projecting to divert the blame from herself, in case the Borg recovered and went on a solo assimilation mission around the ship. 

                She had to take a moment to lean against the wall. Her joints were shot through with burning pain, and her knees wanted to abandon posts. This, she hadn’t expected. The constant complaints from her body with the resistant feeling that it would all be worth it. If only to nourish the former foe of the Federation back to health. 

                Janeway bowed her head into a shaking hand, the shivers taking vengeance. “Good grief, what am I doing?” she admonished herself, but kept heading for the med bay anyway. 

                “Ah, Captain, I’m glad to see you,” the Doctor said the second the door opened. “Our patient seems to have regained some strength. She seems almost pliant.”

                Still on the bed but open-eyed and taking in her surroundings more calmly than before, her head jolted up as the Doctor brought Janeway across to see her. There was warning in those eyes, black as vacuum, the implanted iris of the left fixed in narrow focus. The muscles were still pulled taut as if all straining to hold to the small movement of her neck, everything below the shoulders flat on the bed as if strapped there. 

                “Seven of Nine? How are you feeling?” Janeway ventured, taking a step closer.

                No response. Only the same flat stare. 

                “I’m afraid she still hasn’t spoken since she collapsed,” the Doctor said. “Assuming you were prepared, I was wondering if…”

                “Yes,” sighed Janeway, her throat tightening even as she felt her breasts swell hot at the mere thought. 

                She went to stand beside the Borg’s bed with the smallest motions she could muster. The Doctor remained, his brow furrowed in concern.

                “Some privacy, if you wouldn’t mind.”

                He started. “Oh, of course,” he said and switched himself off, disappearing with a trill from the computer. 

                Janeway sat as far over the edge of the bed as she could without falling off, support from her knees still AWOL. “I won’t do this if you don’t want it.” She turned, looked the Borg in the eye. “But I want to help.”

                Seven of Nine seemed to respond to something, whether it was the entreaty she extracted from the human’s expression or the honesty of her words. The implant iris opened a fraction, revealing a sliver of blue beneath. 

                “Please, just let me.” Janeway heard something unexpected, unintended let go in the plea. The nervous tension in her chest left her gasping the words. 

                The Borg’s head lowered back down to the pillow, deliberately and with a fragile grace. She watched as the human opened her attire from the back, brought it forward to bare the soft pink flesh that provided meagre protection to her shoulder blades and spine, mere breakable bones. She sat up for a closer observation of the gesture, at which the female had turned away, examining the floor for something incomprehensible. She reached out a hand, to perform an analysis of the skin the female appeared to present to her.

                At the touch of Seven of Nine’s cold hand, the implant over the palm and fingers tracing the base of her neck and root of spine, another shiver went through her. She closed her eyes to focus on the touch, letting go the clothing that she’d held to cover herself without intention. Leaning into the gentle, if rigid support of the Borg’s hand, she turned in to bring her legs onto the bed, her uniform loose about her waist. She sat there still, save for the shuddering breaths that trembled over her shoulders, her breasts with their dark areolae so swollen they almost overflowed their buds, down to their generous shadow over her stomach.

                Seven of Nine removed her hand from the human’s back and brought it to the base of her ribcage, a shape that left its own shadow in the revealing light of the sickbay, as she had heard the room named. The flesh withdrew in response, muscle tightening, the woman tilting her head to one side a little and sighing, making her breasts lift and swell even further. 

                An urge overcame Seven, inferior, even animal. She pushed herself up on her hands to take the nearest nipple in her mouth and sucked hard, for the sake of her continued functionality. A warm, sweet substance flooded over her tongue as it lapped at the firm nipple, needful, unbidden by any requirement of her body but for more. It was almost so sweet as to be rejected by her convulsing throat as she swallowed, her abdominal quadrant as it warmed. But, for more, she sucked again, shifting against the body that reeled back as if to free itself from her.

                Janeway, though, had only been overwhelmed by the satisfaction it brought her to feel the drone feed. Her hips had bucked forward on impulse and she let the feeling take her, lying back on the bed with Seven of Nine’s voracious lips latched over the fullness of her nipple. With each squeeze of the Borg’s mouth that forced her tongue harder against the skin, she felt the soft rush of the milk from somewhere deep, close to the heart and pushed up to meet the hunger that couldn’t seem to taste her enough. She felt the heat in the other nipple and cupped the breast in her hand to feel the milk surge and drip between her fingers and down her arm in abundance. 

                “There’s my girl,” Janeway breathed, only half-aware that the words were coming from her, coaxing the creature taking its sustenance. “There’s my good girl. Slow now. There’s plenty for you to have your fill.”

                The Borg sucked hard and fast a few times more, almost choking, before she settled into a deep, steady rhythm, her tongue soft but still moving over the feeding breast. She laid her body across Janeway’s, the metal rings, studs and ridges of her skin-tight leathers digging into her, even the lower half still clothed. God, was she going to feel this tomorrow. She prayed she would. 


End file.
